10. Mr. First Nighter

MR. FIRST NIGHTER

THOSE AWARDS

March 1994

Writing in late January, it is already too clear that the fix is in, even more than usual, on the Academy Awards. The earlier awards, of the New York Film Critics Circle, the Golden Globes of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and other lesser lights, have presaged the main event.

The Oscars have increasingly taken on the dimensions of a racket. Since the eligible movies are those that emerge at any point during the calendar year, and since the producers fully understand the minuscule attention span of the typical Academy dimwit, all the Big Pictures, calculated to appeal to said dimwit, are held back until December 30 or 31. As a result, the experts were confidently predicting awards in late December to movies that no one had yet seen. The major studios have always had special previews for Academy members (i.e., Oscar voters) for the pictures they are hyping for the awards; now, that has been supplemented by videocassettes expressed to the homes of each voter.

To the average Academy moron, the only movie deserving an award is that reeking with pretension: slow, ponderous, boring and therefore inevitably pregnant with what the “Saturday Night Live” comic calls “Deep Thoughts.” In recent decades, as Hollywood culture has gone sharply leftward, this has also meant a blend of leftish nihilism and what used to be called “social significance.” 1993 was a year even more nightmarish for these attributes than usual. As far as Big Movies go, it was year to head for the storm cellar.

If the Pretentious Pictures come out in late December, the early summer is the time for movies that people may actually enjoy: a time for the fun movie. Last summer, even I was lulled into a false sense of security, for the summer movies, in recent years strictly for the teenage monster-loving crowd, were in 1993 a relatively superior lot. The Fugitive, my own personal choice for Best Movie of the Year, was magnificent; in pace, timing, and tight editing a throwback to the great suspense and adventure movies of the past. It’s a taut thriller from beginning to end, with not a moment wasted. It’s one of the best films in many years. Other movies of last summer were not as superior, but still noteworthy, especially Clint Eastwood’s In the Line of Fire, about a veteran Secret Service agent blocking the villainous John Malkovich from assassinating the president. Also excellent was Search for Bobby Fischer, an unusual film that catches the spirit of the chess world and centers on a remarkable child actor himself a chess prodigy. Further down the list but still worth seeing as what used to be called “good hot weather fare”: Jurassic Park, a fun movie if not taken seriously. (Can anyone imagine that billionaire Richard Attenborough and his team of crack scientists and computer mavens would construct a dinosaur park (a) in a hurricane belt, and (b) without a protective backup if the electrified fence went out?) Also Sleepless in Seattle, which however was a pathetically far cry from the romantic comedies of the 1930s and 40s it imitates. It’s one thing to meet by accident, lose your love, and then find her again; it’s quite another, however, to fall in love very intensely without ever having met. The movie also lacks the crackling wit that is usually the hallmark of director Nora Ephron.

But don’t worry: none of these movies will come anywhere near the Oscar bullseye. (Except for the marvelous actor, Tommy Lee Jones, who will get the Best Supporting Actor prize for The Fugitive when he really deserves Best Actor.) For, as we said, the fix is in, and the winners will be the most repellent lot of Politically Correct cinema in many a moon: Best Picture: Schindler’s List; Best Actor: Tom Hanks in Philadelphia; Best Actress: Holly Hunter in The Piano. Best Supporting Actress will probably be Winona Ryder, in the Age of Innocence, a movie which is indeed pretentious but not repellent, although La Ryder scarcely deserves the honor. The only suspense left in the Oscars is whether the sainted Steven Spielberg will get the Best Director spot for Schindler’s List. (The problem is that while the entire Academy votes for the other spots, only directors vote for Best Director, and the veteran schlockmeister Spielberg is less than popular with his peers.) The only other suspense at this writing is who will get the coveted spot as comic MC to keep the interminable award ceremony going, now that Billy Crystal has withdrawn after several years in the post.

Since I am not a professional movie critic I am not obliged to see what I know in advance I will dislike, so I haven’t seen either Schindler’s List or Philadelphia. Schindler’s List is a movie which has become not only Politically Incorrect but even taboo to be less than worshipful about, since it purports to enable us, for the umpteenth time, to Learn About The Holocaust (the latter term always capitalized to emphasize its solemnity and to assert its Absolute Uniqueness in the grisly world historical record of mass murder).

And yet anyone who tries to Learn About History by going to a Hollywood movie deserves to have his head examined. Did we really learn the true story of Moses by watching Charlton Heston, or by seeing the great Yul Brynner, as Pharaoh, say finally, in his Siberian accent, after being visited by the plagues, “Go, Moses, take your people and go”? Or did we learn the facts about the monster Cromwell by seeing Richard Harris in the hagiographical movie of the same name? And yet, we are supposed to sit respectfully and in awe, as if we were in church, for over three hours, to watch what is admittedly a fictionalized version of a novel, and to act as if this is new and shattering History we are imbibing! While Thomas Keneally’s novel was fiction loosely based on fact, the Spielberg movie is far more loosely grounded fiction based on the shaky foundation of a novel: fiction-squared, so to speak. Also the idea that a German concentration camp commandant would shoot prisoners at random with a rifle, just for the sport, goes against everything we know about German military discipline or about the way any large concentration camp has to be run. These dramatic scenes in the movie, of course, have no grounding in historical fact whatever.

Apart from that, watching a concentration camp for three hours is not exactly my idea of a fun evening at the theater; anyone who enjoys watching concentration camps is better advised to watch the French film Shoah, which is a full nine-and-a-half hours long, to be topped off by Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s absurdist seven-hour German film, Our Hitler. Then, if your appetite for watching Nazis hasn’t yet been slaked, you can segue to the fifteen-and-a-half hour German film Heimat. And then, maybe, as they say these days, we “can put it all behind us,” and get on to other topics. Or is that too much to ask?

And yet, the only criticism of the film has come from reviewers who claim that the movie is not pro-Jewish or anti-Gentile enough, since the protagonist Oskar Schindler, a contractor who saved Jews in his employ, was a Gentile. At this point it is difficult to see how Schindler could have been made to be Jewish, since if he were he would undoubtedly have been an inmate of the camp rather than a contractor.

The idea that watching Schindler’s List should be treated as a religious experience led to an amusing culture clash in Oakland, California (LA. Times, January 21). In celebration of Martin Luther King Day a group of black high school students in Oakland were shepherded to see a showing of the movie, presumably to Uplift them from their usual movie fare. The result: disaster. The kids acted the way they usually do in a movie: making noise, laughing and giggling in the wrong parts, generally not treating the picture with the reverence that the more elderly folk there thought it deserved.

As a result, as the theater owner puts it, “About 30 outraged patrons poured into the lobby, complaining about the derisive laughter and offensive comments during the atrocities when Jews were murdered on screen. I’ve never seen such furious, hurt customers. Some were Holocaust survivors and one woman was sobbing.” The owner thereupon stopped the movie, and ordered all the high school students ejected.

The four teacher–chaperons who had herded the kids there were themselves outraged at the ejection. One, Dean of Students Tanya Dennis, claimed that the students were “evicted unfairly, with no warning,” and she hinted that the cause was racism: “Some elderly white people were wondering what black kids were doing at the movie. Our kids have seen more violence and suffered more oppression than these people.”

Perhaps the most interesting defense of the young lads and lasses was by one of their chaperons, math teacher Aaron Grumet, who, according to the LA. Times, had “lost relatives in the Holocaust.”

“Most of my students have seen people shot, so they laughed when the shooting didn’t look realistic. They’re not Afro–American kids laughing at Jewish horror, they’re the inner-city, hip-hop generation, desensitized to violence because they see it everyday.”

So what does Spielberg expect, if he won’t make shooting scenes sufficiently realistic?

Shalon Paige, aged 14, one of the black students in question, set forth the student point of view: “When the Jewish girl got shot in the head, she moved weird so some kids laughed. They didn’t have to kick nobody out. Maybe they’re so upset at us, prejudiced because they’re white.” Ms. Paige went on to explain the student disaffection: “They didn’t want to see a three-hour movie in black-and-white. We don’t know about the war. It was long ago and far away and about people we never met.” So much for History! Other students explained that the only reason they went on the field trip was because it included ice skating afterward, and many of them took the opportunity to duck out of Schindler’s List and sneak into the adjoining Pelican Brief and Grumpy Old Men. Smart kids, even though budding historians they ain’t!

As for Philadelphia, what do you need to know about it except that its hero, Tom Hanks, is an AIDS Victim?

This brings me to The Piano, a movie which I fell into in a weak moment. The Piano is far and away the Worst Movie I have seen in many years, perhaps since what may well be the Worst Movie of All Time, the absurdist-nihilist Fellini monstrosity, Juliet of the Spirits (1965). (Note: to qualify as a Worst Movie, it has to reek of pretension and deliberate boredom: therefore, Grade Z movies such as the latest teenage monster movie don’t even begin to qualify.) The Piano has no redeeming feature: it is excruciatingly slow and boring; it seems to have been filmed in muddy brown, so that it could just as well have been in black-and-white; it is irrational and absurdist, with characters either having no discernible motivation or changing their motivations on a dime. And Holly Hunter, putative Best Actress of the Year, who has always been an irrational non-actress, reaches a nadir here, her ugly lantern-jawed face made even uglier by being framed by a black bonnet, and her face fixed in an unvarying expression of grim hostility She is also accompanied by a daughter, conceived without benefit of a husband, of about twelve, who is equally ugly and also framed by a black bonnet, and who is also unusually irritating for a kid actor. (Kid actress might even cap the horror by winning the Best Supporting Actress award.)

Hunter is supposed to have come from Scotland to New Zealand as a mail-order bride to what might be called a “planter,” except he and his tiny community seem to spend all their time wandering through the jungle. Hunter and many of the other émigrés are saddled with a phony Scottish burr so thick that it is difficult to make out much of the dialogue. (Considering the nature of the dialogue, however, that’s probably a blessing.)

Crucial to the “plot” is the fact that Hunter is mute. Why is she mute? As she points out in her voice over narration, she stopped talking at the age of six with no idea why. So much for the comprehensibility of these besotted characters. The film critics, who, naturally, have all gone bananas over The Piano, gush about the fact that Hunter “expresses herself through her music,” her music being the piano in question. Unfortunately, we hear a lot of her piano playing in the movie. Hunter, of course, played the piano herself (there was no dubbing in of Van Cliburn or his moral equivalent), and it shows. Let’s face it, Holly Hunter is a lousy pianist, and without benefit of this excruciating movie, she would not have the opportunity of foisting her lack of musicianship upon the long-suffering public. But this is by no means all: the time is supposed to be around the 1840s. OK, there was a lot of great piano music current in that era. So is she playing Chopin, or Schumann, and at least giving us a glorious soundtrack? Not on your tintype. What she plays is newly composed New Age noodling, sans rhythm, melody, or structure. So much for the authenticity of this film.

And now we come to the toperoo of this move. The directress of this movie. The directress of the film is the New Zealander Jane Campion, and one of the reasons this movie has been getting a fantastic press is because: “At last! Now the movies are displaying feminist eroticism.” And on and on, about how erotic and “sexy” The Piano is supposed to be.

Puh-leeze! Emetic, not erotic, is the proper term. About the only character in the movie who both acts well and whose motives are comprehensible is Sam Neill, the unfortunate husband, who is so Insensitive and Male Oppressive that he actually is interested in sleeping with his bride. Naturally, La Hunter is as surly as possible, and instead falls into a relationship with a thuggish, beer-belly Harvey Keitel (“How wonderful it is to see a naked male body that is not ideal!”). Keitel, even though another jungle-walking “planter,” has Gone Native, hangs around with dancing, happy Maoris, and has gotten his ugly puss covered with some kind of Aborigine Tattoo or Paint or who knows what. Keitel manages to win Hunter’s favors in an elaborate kind of S-M game, where he will sell her back the Piano, which he, and not the husband, had paid the Maoris to cart through the woods to his hut, one “black key” at a time, in exchange for various degrees of seduction. Neill is also Insensitive enough to become enraged when he finds that his bride was fooling around with Keitel rather than himself.

In the end, the two “lovers” go off in a Maori canoe, carting the grotesque Grand Piano with them. For some unexplained reason, Hunter, who had spent the entire movie moping about her beloved piano, suddenly decides to tell the Abos to toss the piano overboard. Her foot gets caught in the rope, drowning along with her damned piano. Unfortunately, however, even that small moment of delight was denied me, and she is rescued.

The famous erotic scene of the two principals naked is enough to get almost anyone to swear off pornography. Holly Hunter in addition to her pointy jaw, has shoulders like a linebacker, and she behaves just as grimly in the allegedly joyful sex scene as she does in the rest of the picture.

One of the many puzzling aspects of The Piano, indeed, is why two grown men spend so much of their time lusting after La Hunter. At first it seems that she is the only female in the region, except that’s not true either, since there is a pointless skit put on at a church by some British settlers. But even if she was the only female, and even if Neill and Keitel’s sensibilities had been dulled by years in the jungle, their enthusiasm for Hunter remains one of the unexplained, irrational motivations in The Piano.

As I said, The Piano has no redeeming feature whatever. Except for poor Sam Neill, who deserves far better things (Neill was Reilly in that grand British TV miniseries, “Reilly, Ace of Spies”), everyone connected with this picture: La Campion, the actors, the costumer, the cinematographer, the whole kit and kaboodle, should have been drowned along with The Piano.

July 1990

CINEMA PARADISO

Directed by Guiseppe Tornatore with Philippe Noiret

Long-time readers know that I am decidedly not a fan of foreign language movies: not because it is a chore to read subtitles, but because they are invariably horrible examples of aggressively avant-garde, anti-bourgeois cinema. Hating as “commercial” movies that appeal to the average movie-goer, the foreign movie-maker proclaims his superior esthetic sensibility by scorning interesting plot, tight writing and directing, meaningful dialogue, glamorous photography, or colorful settings. Instead, the typical foreign movie has zero plot, minimal dialogue, and wastes enormous amounts of time on close-ups of the brooding actors’ gloomy faces, all seemingly photographed in the midst of some dark and dank box. The ineffable and pointless boredom of these motion pictures are apparently supposed to embody the alleged boredom of bourgeois life. In actuality, it is not life, but these infernal movies, that both embody and induce boredom.

The trouble, however, is not with foreigners perse. Italians and Frenchmen, for example, would rather and do spend their time watching Dallas and Clint Eastwood than waste their time and money watching their compatriots’ crummy movies. Moreover, it was not always thus. Jean Renoir, the wonderful 1930s French movies featuring Raimu, and much of the modem work of Eric Rohmer demonstrate that the problem is not with the nationality or language, but with the depraved riffraff who make today’s foreign movies.

But once in a while there comes a shining exception to the rule. In addition to granting Driving Miss Daisy its best picture award for 1989, the Motion Picture Academy gave its foreign-language movie Oscar to Guiseppe Tornatore’s lovely, charming, funny, and heart-warming (as well as heart-breaking) Cinema Paradiso. Disappearing fairly quickly from the screen the first time around, it came back in wake of the award. Go see it: it’s the best foreign-language movie in many a year, and splendid in its own right.

Cinema Paradiso is a heart-felt autobiographical valentine by director and screen-writer Tornatore to the small town in Sicily in which he grew up during and after World War II. The movie is a rich tapestry of life in the Sicilian town, a town without cars or means of entertainment except the local cinema, where everyone crowds in to see the latest Italian or Hollywood product. The central character Salvatore, marvelously played for most of the film by a child actor, is fascinated by the life of the projectionist, the center of movie magic. The projectionist, Alfredo, magnificently played by the great French actor Philippe Noiret, reluctantly becomes a mentor to the boy, whose father had been killed in the war. The local priest views all the movies first, censoring out the—horrors!—kissing scenes, which Alfredo lovingly clips out and saves.

When, over a decade later, the movie theater burns down, a large shining new theater is built, funded by a Neapolitan who had just won the lottery. (As one local complains: “Those Northerners have all the luck!”) In the new dispensation, the local priest no longer has censoring rights, and the local youth go bananas at the love scenes: “Kissing! After thirty years!” Loving the now grown boy, and blinded during the fire, Alfredo orders Salvatore to leave the stifling atmosphere of the Sicilian town, which has allowed him no real life and to go seek his life and fortune in Rome, never to look back.

The death of Alfredo, however, inexorably draws Salvatore, thirty years later and famous as a movie director in Rome, back to his home town for his funeral. He finds enormous change; the town, now packed with automobiles and TV sets, has no more use for the movie theater, which is being torn down for a parking lot. I won’t give away the climactic discovering of Alfredo’s carefully wrought final present for Salvatore, but suffice it to say that it’s at least a two-handkerchief (decidedly non-avant-garde) ending. Don’t miss it!

November 1990

GOODFELLAS

Directed by Martin Scorsese, with Robert DeNiro

Hollywood has brought us two great, romantic genres, two forms of movies where the war of good versus evil could play itself out against a background of an entire complex fictive world grounded in a present or past reality. In this world, coherent action and struggle can emerge dramatically by heroes, villains, their rank and file supporters, and by innocents caught in the crossfire. The first classic genre was, of course, the Western: epitomized in Stagecoach, the great John Wayne movies, and countless others (one of my favorites: the long-forgotten The Bounty Hunter, in which Henry Fonda heroically plays a privatized and highly effective law enforcer hated—naturally—both by the villains and by the sheriffs and deputies whom he outcompetes for far higher pay). Unfortunately, the Western movie is no more, felled perhaps by endless and unimaginative repetition, but possibly, too, by the dogged leftist insistence in the later Westerns for the Indians to be the Good Guys and the whites the Bad. Look, fellas, it doesn’t matter what the literal historical truth may or may not have been; the leftist reversal—the insistence on destroying familiar heroes—simply don’t work, it didn’t scan, and it helped destroy the Western genre.

The more recent innovative Hollywood genre, ranking with the Western, is the Mafia movie: the clash of heroes and villains against a mythic but reality-grounded world, updated to twentieth-century America. Some of the great directors have contributed gems to this genre. John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor, playing off Jack Nicholson and the incomparable Kathleen Turner, was marvelous. But the great classic, the definitive, superb Mafia movie was The Godfathers I and II, in which Francis Ford Coppola poured out a work of genius, grounded in his own and novelist Mario Puzo’s cultural history, which he has never approached since.

The Godfathers were perfection: an epic world, a world of drama and struggle, tautly organized and memorably written, beautifully and broodingly photographed, in which greed struggled with the great virtues of loyalty to the famiglia.

The key to The Godfathers and to success in the Mafia genre is the realization and dramatic portrayal of the fact that the Mafia, although leading a life outside the law, is, at its best, simply entrepreneurs and businessmen supplying the consumers with goods and services of which they have been unaccountably deprived by a Puritan WASP culture.

The unforgettable images of mob violence juxtaposed with solemn Church rites were not meant, as left-liberals would have it, to show the hypocrisy of evil men. For these Mafiosi, as mainly Italian Catholics, are indeed deeply religious; they represent one important way in which Italian Catholics were able to cope with, and make their way in, a totally alien world dominated by WASP Puritan insistence that a whole range of products eagerly sought by consumers be outlawed.

Hence the systemic violence of Mafia life. Violence, in The Godfather films, is never engaged in for the Hell of it, or for random kicks; the point is that since the government police and courts will not enforce contracts they deem to be illegal, debts incurred in the Mafia world have to be enforced by violence, by the secular arm. But the violence simply enforces the Mafia equivalent of the law: the codes of honor and loyalty without which the whole enterprise would simply be random and pointless violence.

In many cases, especially where “syndicates” are allowed to form and are not broken-up by government terror, the various organized syndicates will mediate and arbitrate disputes, and thereby reduce violence to a minimum. Just as governments in the Lockean paradigm are supposed to be enforcers of commonly-agreed-on rules and property rights, so “organized crime,” when working properly, does the same. Except that in its state of illegality it operates in an atmosphere charged with difficulty and danger.

It is interesting to observe the contrasting attitudes of our left-liberal culture to the two kinds of crime, organized versus unorganized. Organized crime is essentially anarcho-capitalist, a productive industry struggling to govern itself; apart from attempts to monopolize and injure competitors, it is productive and non-aggressive. Unorganized, or street, crime, in contrast, is random, punkish, viciously aggressive against the innocent, and has no redeeming social feature. Wouldn’t you know, then, that our leftist culture hates and reviles the Mafia and organized crime, while it lovingly excuses, and apologizes for, chaotic and random street punksviolence which amounts to “anarchy” in the bad, or common meaning. In a sense, street violence embodies the ideal of left-anarchism: since it constitutes an assault on the rights of person and property, and on the rule of law that codifies such rights.

One great scene in The Godfather embodies the difference between right and left anarchism. One errant, former member of the Corleone famiglia abases himself before The Godfather (Marlon Brando). A certain punk had raped and brutalized his daughter. He went to the police and the courts, and the punk was, at last, let go (presumably by crafty ACLU-type lawyers and a soft judicial system). This distraught father now comes to Don Corleone for justice.

Brando gently upbraids the father: “Why didn’t you come to me? Why did you go to The State?” The inference is clear: the State isn’t engaged in equity and justice; to obtain justice, you must come to the famiglia. Finally, Brando relents: “What would you have me do?” The father whispers in the Godfather’s ear. “No, no, that is too much. We will take care of him properly.” So not only do we see anarcho-capitalist justice carried out, but it is clear that the Mafia code has a nicely fashioned theory of proportionate justice. In a world where the idea that the punishment should fit the crime has been abandonedand still struggled over by libertarian theoristsit is heart-warming to see that the Mafia has worked it out in practice.

And now, weighing in, in the Mafia sweepstakes, comes a much acclaimed new entrant: Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas. This repellent and loathsome movie, much acclaimed by all of our left-liberal critics (including a rave review in the Marxist weekly In These Times), is as far removed from The Godfather, in style, content, writing, direction, and overall philosophy as it is possible to be.

Instead of good versus bad entrepreneurs, all working and planning coherently and on a grand scale, GoodFellas is peopled exclusively by psychotic punks, scarcely different from ordinary, unorganized street criminals. The violence is random, gratuitous, pointless, and psychotic; everyone, from the protagonist Henry Hill (Ray Liota) on down is a boring creep; there is no one in this horde of “wiseguys” or “goodfellas” that any member of the viewing audience can identify with. The critics all refer to the psycho gang member Tommy (Joe Pesci), but what they don’t point out is that everyone else in the gang, including the leader Jimmy Conway (Robert DeNiro) is almost as fully deranged.

When Tommy kills friends or colleagues pointlessly, Jimmy and the others are delighted and are happy to cover-up for him. All of these goons are ultra-high-time preference lowlifes: their range of the future approximates ten minutes, in contrast to the carefully planned empire-building of The Godfather. Conway, after pulling off a multi-million dollar heist at Kennedy Airport, shoots all of his colleagues to grab all the money. This sort of behavior, as well as the random violence of Tommy, would put these guys out of business within weeks in any real Mafia organization worth its salt. Street punk short-term greed and whim-worship would get you killed in short order.

Since there are no good guys among the GoodFellas, the audience doesn’t care what happens to them; indeed, one wishes them all to meet their just deserts as quickly as possible, so that the movie will be over. The rest of the film is as odious as the central theme; the direction, as in all of Scorsese, is edgy, hurky-jerky, quasi-psychotic; the photography, in contrast to the epic brooding of Godfather, is light, open and airy, totally out of keeping with the theme. The writing is flat and pointless. Great actors like DeNiro are wasted in the movie. And the much-praised Don in the film, Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino) is grimly quiet and slow moving, but he too is pointless and his role ineffectual, and therefore he fails as any sort of menace.

Contrast the ways in which Godfather and GoodFellas handle a common theme: the attempt of the leading Don to keep away from traffic in drugs, and the destruction wrought by succumbing to the temptation. In Godfather, one Mafia leader of the old school clearly and eloquently rejects traffic in drugs as immoral, in contrast to other venerable goods and services, such as liquor, gambling and “loan sharking.” “Leave drugs to the animals—the niggers—they have no souls,” he admonished. (All right, I never said that the Mafiosi were racially enlightened.) Here is a powerful and dramatic theme of keeping the old Mafia moral code as against the temptation of making a great deal of money in a technologically innovative field.

But how in contrast does GoodFellas handle this conflict? Don Cicero simply orders his gang to stay out of drugs, pointing only to the stiff sentences the Feds were handing out. And whereas in Godfather, everyone knows that disobedience to the Don will bring swift retribution, Conway, Hill and the other wiseguys disobey Don Cicero and nothing happens to them. What kind of Don is that?

Clearly, the critics admire and apologize for the left-anarchic punks of GoodFellas the way they could never admire the Mafiosi of the Godfather, despite the universal respect for the older movie’s technical brilliance. Alas, the corrupt nihilist value-system of avant-garde left-liberalism relates happily to the value-system of the deranged GoodFellas. “This,” say these critics contentedly of the world of the GoodFellas, “is what life is all about. Godfather romanticizes life (and is therefore wrong).”

Will GoodFellas succeed in wrecking the Mafia genre, the best Hollywood discovery since the death of the Western? There is hope, on two counts. First, I would point out that these punks are not true Mafia; they were never “made” by the Mafia families. These are riffraff, hangers-on, lowlifes compared to the epic grandeur of the world of the Mafia. In fact, in the only act of violence that makes sense in the entire movie, the only one that is not pointless and that is eminently justified, the rotten and demented Tommy gets his just deserts at the hands of the genuine Mafia. Told that he will at last achieve his life-long goal of being “made” by a Mafia family, the monster Tommy reaps his just reward. Bang, bang!

The other ray of hope is that, at long last, and after two decades, Godfather, Part III is scheduled to hit the screens around Christmas. What a Christmas gift! The whole crew is back, older and perhaps wiser, continuing the great saga of the Corleone family. The only hitch is that the superb Robert Duvall, one of the great actors of our time and Mr. Consiglieri himself, asked for too much money and therefore could not be included in the picture. But that’s OK. If luck is with us, Godfather III will restore our vision of what a Mafia film is supposed to look like. Make way, riffraff of the Scorsese famiglia! The true Don, Corleone, is back, and you, like your creature and comrade Tommy, are going to reap your just reward.

December 1990

METROPOLITAN

Directed and written by Whit Stillman

Social realism, we sometimes forget, does not have to be about the poor, the underclass, or upwardly mobile immigrants. Social realism, even in New York City, can be about the glamorous, wealthy, preppie Upper East Side. In this lovely gem of a movie, this low-budget “sleeper,” Whit Stillman, in his first film, brings us a sweet, affectionate, autobiographical valentine about WASP preppie youth in New York. Not since George Roy Hill’s wonderfully and hilarious The World of Henry Orient (1964) has the preppie/deb life been so perceptively and admirably portrayed.

Realistically but affectionately, Stillman shows us a slice of life during Christmas week, when the life of these college freshmen and sophomores is one continuous round of expansive deb parties followed by all-night flirtations and bull-sessions. As one reviewer marveled: these people speak in whole sentences! Yes indeed, they are articulate, concerned about ideologies, the future of their class (or whether it should have a future!), about their own lives, and the intellectuals among them about literature and culture. All this recalls the days not only of my own youth, but also of all generations of youth until the cultural cataclysm of the late 1960s. But the most heartwarming aspect of this sketch of college youth today is the sweetness and fundamental innocence of these young people. The one girl in the group who sleeps around is known to one and all as “the slut,” and it is gloriously as if the various phases of the Sexual Revolution had never happened. The Old Culture still lives and this fact gives all of us hope for the future of America.

Not, of course, that the Old Culture is or was problem-free. Many of these young people come from broken if upper-class homes, and suffer from paternal-and-stepmother rejection. But they cope with these problems as best they can, with sweetness, determination, and wit. The amiable, earnest, and artless hero, living in relative penury on the déclassé West Side (the only spot in the film that looks—realistically—grubby), is a particularly touching case of such rejection.

This hero, by the way, begins this Christmas week as a seemingly dedicated Fourierite socialist, but at the end of the week and the film, agrees with his new-found friend: “Who wants to live on a farm with a bunch of other people, anyway?”

The photography is superb: never has the Upper East Side looked so sparkling and glamorous; the only analogue is those wonderful Art Deco Park Avenue apartments of 1930s movies, replete with 50-foot ballrooms, alluring gowns, seltzer bottles on the sideboard, and Fred and Ginger doing a turn. Here was a New York that served as a beacon and a Mecca for decades of American youth. The 30s effect is enhanced by the camera direction. Stillman writes that a low-budget required him to go back to the stationary cameras of that Golden Age, and to do so without the self-conscious preening swoops and zooms of modern cinematography, gimmicks that mainly serve to call attention to the camera itself rather than to the life and the action on the screen. Budget or no, the technique fits extremely well and becomes part of the overall magic of this movie.

If you want to imbibe some hope about the future of American youth and culture, rush to see this film before it disappears amidst the welter of contemporary glitz, grunt, and gore. And who knows, one muses on leaving Metropolitan, maybe even New York City, that once wonderful Babylon-on-the-Hudson, can one day be brought back to life.

PC CINEMA:
PSYCHOBABBLE GETS NASTY

September 1991

I’m beginning to think it’s all a long-range leftist plot. First, they tear down our love and admiration for our own culture, by preaching cultural relativism and the irrationality of ethics. “All cultures are equal,” there is no trans-cultural morality, and therefore (and self-contradictorily) it is immoral to count your own culture superior to others. That’s Phase One. And pushing this line and converting everyone to it, comes the Phase Two sockeroo: there are, after all, moral principles and trans-cultural norms, but what they teach us is that our own culture and values are evil: racist, sexist, heterosexist, et al., and ad nauseam. Morality exists, after all, but what it teaches is that we have been immoral all along, and everyone else is superior: a transvaluation of values. Phase One is the necessary softening up process for Phase Two, a process we are now undergoing.

This summer’s cinema is rife with PC, spearheaded by a new trend. Psychobabble, for decades marked by the sickening treacle of “I’m OK, You’re OK, Everyone’s OK,” to get us off our ideas of moral norms, has now shifted gears into a new, far more directly vicious phase: “Middle-class, middle-aged, achieving, white males [MMAWM] are definitely not OK,” as a matter of fact, they need the figurative or even literal equivalent of a shot in the head. A direct, brutal, and vicious assault on MMAWMs in our debased culture are not quite ready for that. It has to be done, then, in the sugar-coated pill of “comedy,” bitter and widess pills which apparently our downtrodden Atlases, the MMAWM, are ready to swallow without seeing the danger or the assault. In that way, the prosperous, unheeding, American bourgeoisie are happy to pour in the dollars to finance their own destruction.

The two particularly vicious anti-MMAWM “comedies” are Regarding Henry and What About Bob? In Mike Nichols’ Regarding Henry, vicious go-getting lawyer, Harrison Ford, is redeemed by being shot in the head. Now a quasi-vegetable, he therefore becomes a dopey, loving, childlike, good human being, because of being deprived of most of his humanity. This sickening story is so blatant that it strikes even liberal critics as idiotic, so that there is at least a chance that this rotten movie will not be a hit.

Unfortunately, it seems that the other horror, What About Bob? has become a hit, helped by the fact that the vicious leech is the genuinely funny Bill Murray. In this movie, successful, uptight shrink Richard Dreyfuss is literally driven insane by patient Bill Murray, who, in the guise of sweet, loving worship of his shrink, turns Dreyfuss’ entire loving but simpering family against him. Once again, evil is the MMAWM who is figuratively shot in the head by Bill Murray, and in fact Dreyfuss is never really redeemed, but remains permanently destroyed. The fact that of all MMAWMs, shrinks above all often deserve to be eviscerated softens us up, but should not blind us to the radical evil of this movie.

Other summer hits do not quite reach the moral depths of these two films, but are sickening in their own right. Thelma and Louise celebrate females achieving power and, “liberated” and on the road, committing violence against hated maledom. Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood manages to ruin the Robin Hood story by substituting gritty mud and “realism” for adventure and romance, by filming the movie in greys and browns, by sticking P.C. blacks and feminists into a medieval English drama, and by having the Good Guys of Sherwood Forest speak terrible English in flat Midwest and California accents, while the Bad Guys speak in English accents. As one reviewer pointed out, this leads one to believe that these are American colonials somehow stuck in a time warp in the middle of Merrie England. Where is Errol Flynn now that we need him?

December 1992

FOR THE BOURGEOISIE

MY FATHERS GLORY, AND MY MOTHER’S CASTLE

One movie in two parts, directed by Yves Robert.
French, with subtitles

Since World War II, with only a few exceptions (usually the films of Eric Rohmer), French cinema has been, for all of us cultural reactionaries, abominable. Almost to a movie, they have been absurdist, snail’s-paced, static, camera lingering lovingly on the pores of the faces of the main actors, plotless, dialog-less, morbid, and irrational. In short, aesthetically and politically leftist and avant-garde.

And yet it was not always thus. French movies before World War II were often splendid: rich, buoyant, funny, worldly-wise, and many of them were the marvelous comedies of the French playwright and moviemaker, Marcel Pagnol. The wonderful trilogy, Marius, Fanny, and Cesar, and The Baker’s Wife, all featuring the incomparable character actor Raimu, were justly celebrated as some of the best movies ever made.

The late Pagnol is now, happily, very much back with us in spirit, in these two superb gems (they have to be seen in the above order), based on the memoirs that Pagnol published shortly before his death. The movies are brought to us, in a wonderful tribute to Pagnol, by his old friend and movie director Yves Robert. The movies are remarkably evocative of Pagnol’s childhood in turn-of-the-century southern France. His father was a schoolteacher in Marseilles, and the family would take the traditional French August vacation in the hills of Provence. At first the family rented the house, and then bought it, and the two films portray young Pagnol growing up, and learning about and falling in love with the Provencal hill country.

And what a childhood it was! The increasingly common modern view is to heap abuse on one’s parents for (a) psychologically messing you up, and being responsible for all your ills; and (b) for being part and parcel of hateful, insensitive, cloddish, comfortable, upper-middle-class bourgeois life. Much of modern culture consists of dumping on the bourgeoisie, on one’s own parents, relatives, neighbors, etc. as being guilty of exploitation of the poor as well as of psychological destruction of the author.

This Pagnol–Robert film is produced as if in defiance of modern convention. For it is, mirabile dictu, a portrayal of a very happy childhood, a childhood, as Mencken once wrote of his own, “encapsulated in love,” Pagnol loves and admires his father, his mother, and even his wealthy reactionary, Catholic uncle, who, in a more trendy film, would be set up as the villain of the piece, but is actually a fine and admirable person. Pagnol’s memoirs are a portrayal of a wonderful lost world: a paean to the bourgeois world of pre-World War I France. And the Provencal hills are so rhapsodically displayed that even I, an inveterate urbanite, felt a tug of empathy.

It must be pointed out: none of this is gushing or overly sentimental, in the cornball Hollywood tradition. The conclusion emerges out of a simple, underplayed story line. The photography is superb yet unobtrusive. And it’s not as if there were no problems in Marcel’s growing up. They were not major, but they are handled with great charm, insight, and affectionate wit. His finding a country friend, learning about nature, his losing his heart to a young vixen and potential dominatrix, are all the more effective for being underplayed and done with a light hand. So lulled are we into an elegiac mood, that the heartbreaking end of the second film, My Mother’s Castle, brings the two-movie set to a powerful two-handkerchief climax.

Many of the reviewers of these movies, arrogant in their trendy negative view of the world, claim that Pagnol could not actually be right, that he must be “repressing,” that his childhood simply couldn’t have been that happy. Rubbish! See these two movies and find yourself back in a world where a happy bourgeois family life was possible: where it happened; and where artists had the simple honesty to defy nihilist convention and proclaim this happy fact to themselves and to the world. And as long as such artists, and such movies, exist, we too can be happy in the knowledge that someday this kind of world can be recovered from memory and nostalgia, and become part of our present and future reality. Some day, when the poisoners of our culture have been sent packing, and our world can be green again.

JULY 1992

HEAR MY SONG

A wondrous, exuberant, very funny, and heartwarming movie by the best new director in many a moon, Peter Chelsom, who also co-wrote the screenplay. A richly-textured show-business film set among Irish immigrants in England (presumably in Liverpool) and in Ireland, Hear My Song is the story, based on fact, of the return to England of the legendary Irish tenor, Josef Locke, who had had to flee the tax collectors twenty-five years before. Marvelously directed with a light and sure touch, the movie provides the best-ever portrayal of Irish rural life and hi-jinks. The sound-track too, is filled with wonderful Irish jazz. Ned Beatty displays surprising ability and panache in the Locke role, and Adrian Dunbar (who co-wrote the script) is excellent in the protagonist role of a scampish theater promoter, strongly reminiscent of Nigel Havers. Don’t miss this low-budget charmer!

WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP

This movie by Ron Shelton, who brought us the splendid baseball movie Bull Durham, has been extravagantly praised by all critics as doing the same for inner-city playground basketball. Don’t you believe it. Unless you’re crazy about incomprehensible shuckin’ and jivin’. The banal plot centers around the fact that Woody Harrelson, though white, can actually play good playground basketball. Harrelson and black actor Wesley Snipes hustle each other and other playground players, and Harrelson has a stormy relationship with a dippy Puerto Rican–Asian girl friend who spends her time trying to get on Jeopardy. Big deal. The only interesting thing about this movie is that I saw it in a neighborhood Manhattan theater. One of the guys waiting in line outside for a bus looked like a refugee from the movie itself, replete with baseball cap perched backward on his head and skate blading around the line. The guy was mortified when the bus driver wouldn’t let him on.

Hey, suppose they made a movie, Black Men Can’t Swim? What do you think would happen?

FRIED GREEN TOMATOES

A charming movie, directed by Jon Avnet, about the rural South, now and in the old days. Outstanding acting by Kathy Bates, Jessica Tandy, and the rest of the cast. A paean to the old Southern way of life, funny and suspenseful. Even the feminism is not obnoxious, with Southern matron Kathy Bates learning to be more assertive and telling off some rude young-punk girls. Based on an autobiographical novel by Alabama-born and raised Fannie Flagg, one of the charms of the movie is that all the Alabama characters, even the Ku Kluxers, are wonderful people, whereas the Georgians, not far across the border, are all nasty villains who beat their wives. And the Georgian Kluxers are real mean.

Organized lesbians have been complaining that the lesbianism of the book is not made explicit in the movie. Tough.

BASIC INSTINCT

The brouhaha over this movie is ridiculous. This is not one of the Major Statements of Our Time. Basically a film noira tough, sleazy cop-and-murder picture, differing from the old films noir by having lots of soft-core porn. There is nothing redeemable about any of the characters, including the “hero” Michael Douglas, who is getting to resemble Papa Kirk more and more, except that his acting is wooden instead of hyper-emotive. Last-minute editing out of the Famous Nude Shot of sexpot-quasi murderess Sharon Stone saved the indispensable R rating for the movie, but destroyed whatever interest it might have had for porn fans. (Now that hard-core porn is easily available, what in the world is the point of the soft-core variety? Why do we have to endure it in general distribution movies?)

Organized lesbians have hysterically attacked this movie for an allegedly negative portrayal. Actually, women in general don’t come off too well, if anyone is crazy enough to look for a Message in this movie. Clearer messages from Basic Instinct would be: (a) Sex is deadly, not so much from AIDS as from a female with an ice-pick; and (b) all female shrinks are evil. Come to think of it, maybe, in its decadent way, this movie can be considered a Moral Tale.

Directed by Paul Verhoeven, whose return to Holland would be welcome.

THE ACADEMY AWARDS

On a dreary occasion, we take what comfort we can. In particular: Billy Crystal’s incredulity at Governor Clinton’s never inhaling marijuana, and the joy of seeing the ugly, no-talent egomaniac La Streisand not get nominated for Best Director. And, not least of all, Crystal mocking the Streisand claim of anti-female discrimination by stating that he didn’t get nominated for Best Actor because he’s a man.

August 1992

THE PLAYER

Heralded and beloved by the left as Robert Altman’s “comeback” movie, this “satire” on Hollywood is both unfunny and meretricious. Supposedly a critique of Hollywood’s commercialism from the standpoint of pure art, it actually panders shamelessly to the mob’s love of celebrity by one of the oldest tricks in the book: quick, little cameo shots at Hollywood “in” locations, leading people in the audience to nudge their escorts and whisper: “Ooohh, isn’t that_______?” throughout the movie. Also, the “good guys” keep making references to pure, avant-garde films of the past, which are allegedly being betrayed in today’s Hollywood. But when you get right down to it, this “betrayal” of purity comes down to happy endings, which are still stubbornly and apparently inexplicably favored by the dumb bourgeoisie.

This movie led me to ruminate about the tremendous cultural decline from the quasi-Commie Old Left of the good old days of cinema to the nihilistic New Left of today. Such great Old Left movies, for example, as Casablanca may have pushed a Commie message (Humphrey Bogart as stand-in for America, tough-talking but with a heart of gold, originally isolationist but slowly but surely drawn into World War II as he/it became aware of the horrors of “fascism”), but they did so totally within the trappings of the bourgeois Old Culture. Neither were Old Left movies afraid of pleasing the audience by way of happy endings. (And what’s wrong with happy endings, anyway, except that they make the audience feel happy and they don’t push the message that life is evil and meaningless?) But now the grand Old Culture is not only cast aside but scorned and ridiculed, and this nihilist message seems to have the highest priority on the current left agenda.

As the protagonist and major “player,” Tim Robbins sleepwalks through a zombie performance, which has naturally been extravagantly praised by the critics as one of the great acting jobs of the year.

Would that Robert Altman stay away permanently.

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

The Old Culture returns in a warm, affectionate story about the American Girls’ Professional Baseball League that was established by some baseball owners during World War II and lasted until the early 1950s. The movie catches the spirit of the 1940s, and its feminist points are therefore never abrasive. Fortunately, the 1990s sensibility is kept out of the film. Geena Davis is excellent as the star baseball player, and director Penny Marshall forges good team performances out of all the players, including even the notorious Madonna, who is kept subdued and amiable in a minor role as “All the Way, Mae,” the strumpet of the team.

The movie falters in the last scenes, when the girl ballplayers of the 1940s go to a reunion in the mid-1980s at Cooperstown, New York, and reminisce over old times. The problem is not only the older actresses who impersonate Davis, Madonna, etc. forty years later, but even more the mixing-in of the real reunion of the professional girls’ league at the same time, ending the movie during the final credits with a pathetic and quietly grim scene of these elderly ladies desperately trying to play baseball. The film should have stayed within the forties’ context.

Any worries that A League of Their Own is too feminist could be eased by reading Georgia Brown’s ranting attack in the Village Voice, denouncing the movie for depicting women as emotional (how unrealistic!) and as not being sufficiently anti-male.

And what a pleasure to hear the word “girl” spoken again, and with no stern schoolmaster-type rushing up to explain why that term is politically incorrect! Perhaps someday Old Culture films will be made in the context of current life, and not just as historical set-pieces.

February 1993

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

Directed by Robert Redford

A picture about fly-fishing in Montana? For an urban New York type like myself who wouldn’t know a fly-fisherman from a surfer, who thinks that fish should be caught in giant nets, and who believes that once you’ve seen one mountain or tree, you’ve seen them all? And from someone who had never heard of Norman Maclean, from whose autobiographical sketch this movie was made?

And yet, I found this a wonderful, enchanting movie. I was enthralled by the entire story of an early twentieth-century family in Montana, by the spare, haunting, marvelous narration culled from that book, and by the motion picture which Redford has obviously made totally in the spirit of the story, with no Hollywoodization, and no beating the audience over the head with every point. I loved the Montana river, was enthralled by the mystique and the technical “four-count” perfection of fly-fishing, charmed by the notion that for the narrator’s Presbyterian minister–father it was difficult to draw the line between religion and fly-fishing. I was captivated by the scene where the narrator Norman’s younger brother Paul breaks through his father’s technique to achieve his own innovative and superior form of fly-fishing.

There are many great little touches in this film: the life of the family; the gentle gripe when the father mentions that his reporter son had changed his name to MacLean, with a capital L, making the family look like “lowland Scots.” There is the teasing byplay between Presbyterians and Methodists: “Methodists are Baptists who can read;” “don’t crowd around him, he’s a Presbyterian.”

And of course the total contempt of fly-fishermen for the crude, easy and popular form of “bait-fishing”: “He’s the kind of peckerwood that will show up with a red Hills Brothers can of worms!” And the minister–father stubbornly if erroneously convinced that “St. Peter was a fly-fisherman.”

In addition, Redford’s deliberate choice of excellent but virtually unknown actors insures that the actors could form an ensemble team without the distraction of “star” celebrities.

What can I say? If this New York peckerwood can be enraptured by a movie about Montana fly-fishing, how much more in love with A River Runs Through It will be those readers who have actual experience of these rural delights! For urban and rural viewers alike, not the least of the charms of this movie is that it shows us life as it used to be lived, life in the Old Republic, of the America that we have lost, or rather that has been seized from us. When will the day come when movies as enchanting and as yea-saying can be made about today’s America? The point of the paleo cultural revolution is not to be content with aching nostalgia, but to set out on the long but rewarding path of Bringing America Back, back to Eden.

THE OSCARS

May 1993

For once, the Academy Awards were tolerable—not the ceremony, which was longer, more boring, and more Politically Correct than ever—but the awards themselves. The Unforgiven was neither my favorite picture of the year, nor a particularly good movie or Western, but it was not too bad, and certainly infinitely better than the repellent Crying Game, which it just beat out by a nose. The great Clint Eastwood deserves an Oscar, and so this can be considered a “lifetime award.” But he was only able to receive it for a genre hated by left-liberals because he made deep obeisances throughout the movie about the evils of violence, or of revenge, about the torments of “killing a man” and all the rest of the liberal swill. In other words, the hero Eastwood acts, most of the time, like a self-hating, liberal anti-hero. Also, the highly touted photography is another liberal feast: dark, murky, monochromatic. Despite all this, The Unforgiven is redeemed at the end by a magnificent and heroic final sequence, in which Eastwood abandons his kvetching and self-loathing and mows down the bad guys in a superb, action-packed tour de force.

One liberal critic explained that Eastwood could finally be given an award because such a long time had elapsed that he can be “forgiven” for the superb, right-wing Dirty Harry, one of the great movies of our age, directed by the same right-wing Don Siegel who brought us the top science-fiction movie in decades, the superb, scary, “conspiracy-theorist” Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the original, not the crummy, special-effects-driven, remake).

And yet some leftists are never satisfied. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen bellyached that Morgan Freeman, black sidekick of Eastwood in Unforgiven, is accepted as a person by hero, villain, and the public alike and not constantly noticed or denounced for his race; according to the crackpot Cohen, Eastwood thereby deliberately underplays the “vicious racism” of the Old West and blah blah.

My own candidate for Best Picture was Scent of a Woman, a wonderfully dramatic and romantic old-fashioned “movie-movie,” which features a truly bravura acting performance by Al Pacino, the best of his career (for which he was a walkover for the Best Leading Actor award). Pacino, a bitter ex-colonel blinded in a drunken accident, teams up with a refreshing young actor, Chris O’Donnell, as his minder while he has a last fling on the town before committing suicide in the military manner. O’Donnell, a poor scholarship lad in a posh Eastern prep school, faces a moral dilemma: should he snitch on a prank committed by his snotty schoolmates on the sneering, despotic headmaster, marvelously played by a former leading villain on the daytime soap operas? During the wild weekend, Pacino and the young lad learn from each other, and help each other through their respective crises, with Pacino delivering a great stump speech in the finale on the true requisites of becoming a “leader of men.” Screenwriter Bo Goldman contributes a stirring screenplay, filled with the kind of sharp dialogue you rarely hear these days where grunts and gropes pass for conversation. Liberal avant-garde critics didn’t like Scent of a Woman, calling it “superficial” and “sentimental.” Translated: optimistic and life-affirming. That’s all you need to know.

Emma Thompson got the Leading Actress award for Howard’s End, the best of a poor crop in a typically pretentious, boring E.M. Forster movie that usually gets awards from unduly impressed Americano boobs. Gene Hackman was a solid choice for the villain in Unforgiven, although I would have preferred the sparkling performance of Jack Nicholson as the Queegish Marine martinet in A Few Good Men. A Few Good Men was a so-so movie, but the sort (with Tom Cruise and Nicholson) that usually gets lots of award; for some reason it faded in the pre-award stretch. I’m usually not a great Nicholson fan, finding his eternal puckish leer tiresome, but he played this role to the hilt.

The Best Supporting Actress pick was a steal, since Marisa Tornei, who played a Brooklyn ethnic in the comic My Cousin Vinnie, was the leading actress, in what could scarcely be called a “supporting” role. This continues the common fraudulent practice of studios bumping down leading actors and actresses to the “supporting” category so as to increase their chances for an Oscar. In any case, Miss Tomei’s cartoonish stint was far inferior to Miranda Richardson’s striking performance in Damage. The award to Tornei is all the more inapt since the genuine star turn in the movie was that of “Cousin Vinnie” himself, the funny and frenetic Joe Pesci, who wasn’t nominated for any award at all.

The true victory of the Oscars, however, was negative, in that the outrageously hyped, repellent The Crying Game came away without the Best Picture award. The Crying Game became a hit solely on the basis of an infamous coalition between the producer’s outrageous hype and the battery of perverse, nihilistic left-liberal movie critics, who loved the picture beyond endurance. An undistinguished Irish drama about the IRA, the movie was hyped by the notorious Weinstein brothers, owners of Miramax, movie distributors who are unusually obnoxious even for the movie industry. The hype employed the gimmick of imploring critics and audiences alike not to give away the wonderful plot “surprise” of the movie. Critics kept talking about the “surprise,” which brings new meaning and new insight to the nature of “love,” and, as one critic put it, takes love beyond the “simplicities” of Sound of Music and into the “complexities” of “modern love.” And even though the “secret” had been given away by the very fact that the movie’s “heroine,” British Negress hairdresser Jaye Davidson, was nominated for Best Supporting “Actor,” not “Actress,” Siskel and Ebert got into a furious fight on their popular TV show, when Ebert screamed at Siskel for “giving away” the precious secret.

The secret? That Jaye Davidson, girl friend of the IRA man’s prisoner, whom the IRA man falls in love with, turns out to be a man, a truth, needless to say, graphically presented to the audience. In short, old simplicity means hetero-sex, modern “complexity” means transves-tite/transsexual sex.

In fact, this seems to be The Big Cultural Event of the Year: gender-bending. Not the old-hat idea that homosexuality is acceptable or good even or even better; but that there is no difference between the sexes at all, that the seemingly natural “boundaries” between the sexes is only an artificial product of male-heterosex-dominated Western culture. Following on the heels of the Crying Game, is the latest hot movie in London, which soon will hit these shores: Orlando, a film of the old Virginia Woolf novel, in which the hero/heroine changes his/her sex every century, a male one century a female the next, and son. Get the picture? And then we have the crazy female anthropologist with the hyphenated name writing an op-ed page in the august New York Times proclaiming that “Western Culture” has imposed the view that there are only two sexes. Instead, there are really five, the Orthodox, Judeo-Christian two, plus three versions of hermaphrodite, whom she claims constitutes 5 percent of the population, which 5 percent have of course been driven into the closet by our repressive culture. Next step: affirmative action quotas for the oppressed victimized hermaphrodite masses, yearning for validation. Yes, we must demand 5 percent hermaphrodites in our faculties, our professions, in the U.S. Senate, etc. Will all the oppressed hermaphrodites please stand up and reveal themselves?

And what about the Siamese Twin masses? When I was a kid, I saw Siamese Twins at a sideshow. Surely they must be a deeply suppressed, even cut-up, 5 percent of the population. Hell, let’s make it 10 percent. Ten percent affirmative action quotas for the oppressed Siamese Twin peoples! And let’s stop calling them with that disparaging name “Siamese.” They are “Native American Twins!”

Sound of Music, oh Sound of Music, you were really a tedious movie, but please, please, Bring it Back! Bring Back the Old Culture before it’s too late! Who will deliver us from this horrible FREAK House that our culture has become?

FRENCH MASTERPIECE!

May 1993

Faithful readers of mine are in for a severe shock. As they well know, I am notoriously hostile to films that are (a) slow, (b) dark and murky, (c) with long close-ups of suffering actors’ faces substituting for dialogue, and (d) in a foreign language. Indeed these four elements almost always go together.

Recently, I saw a movie which has all four of these elements. So much so, in fact, that an old friend of mine, who loves slow, plodess, gloomy, avant-garde movies, saw the film in Paris, and said that he and his friends went reeling out of the theater, “holding their heads,” after three long, suffering hours. (Actually, it’s less than two hours but to him it felt like three.) I went to the theater fully prepared either to squirm uncomfortably, or to take a nap in the luxurious seats.

Instead, to the stunned surprise of myself and my wife, I found a genuine masterpiece, one of the best and most notable pictures in years. The picture is indeed French: Tons Les Matins du Monde, (“Every Morning in the World”) directed by Alain Corneau, from a novel written in conjunction with the movie by Pascal Quignard, who then transformed it into the screenplay. It’s true that there is little dialogue, but essentially substituting for it is truly glorious seventeenth-century French Baroque music, featuring the Baroque viola da gamba, essentially the Baroque ancestor to the modern cello. The music is truly a revelation, largely composed by the main figures in the movie. For the plot of the movie concerns the legendary seventeenth-century violist and composer Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe (no first name known) and his student and disciple, the better-known Marin Marais. In addition to being a movie about little-remembered but marvelous musicians and composers, the soundtrack and the plot feature the music itself. It is also a romantic, moving, and perceptive film about the truths and tensions of master-disciple relationship, which carries insights beyond music into scholarship, science, and indeed every walk of life. Sainte-Colombe is the pure musician, who, while the premier violist and composer of his day, has retreated into a quasi-hermetic existence, not merely out of mourning for his dead young wife, but also in revulsion against the trivialization of music by the flashy musicians and composers of King Louis XIV’s court.

Scorning a call to play in the King’s service, Sainte-Colombe is pestered by a bright young violist and composer who wants to study under him; the master is reluctant, for he sees the opportunism in the young lad’s character. In later years, the student, young Marin Marais, indeed betrays Saint-Columbe’s daughter and leaves to become famous in the King’s service; but later, older and fatter, Marin, knowing that the true soul of music had escaped him, returns to try to listen undetected to hear Sainte-Colombe play the marvelous lost compositions that the master refuses to publish and will take with him to his grave. In a stunning final sequence, the dying Sainte-Colombe and the returned and chastened Marais play a magnificent and heart-rending viola duet of the previously lost music.

The older Marais is played by the highly overrated Gerard Depardieu, but fortunately his part is a small one, the young Marais played by his son Guillaume, who actually looks very little like his old man. But the real star of the movie is Jean-Pierre Marielle, who is simply magnificent as the noble maitre, Sainte-Colombe.

This is one of the great films of recent years which should not be missed. Although you should be warned that if you are so base as not to like Baroque music, this movie is not for you. The film came out in late 1991, but why didn’t it receive the foreign film Oscar last year? Actually I am happy to report that this film received seven Cesars (the French equivalent of the Oscar), and won awards for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Music. The sound track for Tous Les Matins has also been a big hit; over 350,000 copies of the CD have been sold in Europe, outselling even Michael Jackson in France, and was also No. 1 in Argentina. When the film opened in New York, 5,000 copies of the CD were sold in one week, actually outselling Madonna’s “Erotica.” Hey, maybe there’s hope for our culture yet!

Music historians are griping because the plot is inaccurate, since little is known of Sainte-Colombe’s life. But who cares? What’s wrong with fiction? As it is, the film is a wonderful, romantic tribute to musicians as well as to music, and to the best of the Old Culture. Music scholar Mark Kroll writes in the journal Bostonia (Spring 1993) that “there are moments in the film when one seems to be looking at a painting by Vermeer or Watteau which has come to life. Several musicians have also commented how startled they were by the quiet; that is, how faithfully the director was able to recreate the acoustical context in which this music was actually heard, one undisturbed by all the external white noise pollution of twentieth-century life.” Yes, yes! See the movie, then buy the soundtrack, for the Baroque, in music, art, architecture, was the pinnacle that human civilization has yet reached.